How can I listen to audio books for free on my Smartphone?

How to listen to audio books for free on your Android, iPhone or other Smartphone device.

My one and only New Year's Resolution was to read at least 15 books in 2013. Since I spend a lot of time in my car, one way to help accomplish this inexpensively is to go to the library and take out audio books on CD. Some people complain that they can't focus on audio books, but for me they work fine. Sort of like watching a 14 hour movie with all of the images in my head.

But I also like to walk and go to the gym and thought how great it would be if I could have the book with me everywhere to listen to whenever I found the time. Oh sure, I could dig out an old Sony Walkman CD player, but if you do anything that lasts more than an hour you'll need to carry more than one of the CDs with you since most audio books consist of ten to 14 disks. And then there are the convenient little digital book Playaway thingys that have the entire book on a little digital device that only requires you to plug in your own earphones and you can pop it into your pocket and listen away. However, at my library at least, the titles available for those is much shorter.

Hey dude, that's not how you listen to books!

So, is there a way to transfer entire audio books to my Android or iPhone for free? Duh! Of course. It's really no different than downloading a music CD. And the good news is, as you burn each CD it creates a folder (usually) for each CD indicating the title of the book and the disk number. That way I can listen in my car, note what track I'm on and simply continue listening on my phone using whatever audio listening program I wish (I usually use TuneWiki because on a couple of occasions the Google Play Music app would play everything in reverse.

Although transferring an entire book is a bit time consuming, it's really quite simple. Yes, you have to burn each CD separately, but they will be conveniently located in your Music folder on your phone or SD card for easy access.

Here's what I do:

1) Open Windows Media Player and load the first CD into your computer. The CD will populate within the media player.

2) Once the CD populates, click on the Rip Settings tab at the top of the screen, go to more options and make sure the Format is set to MP3.

3) Click on Start Rip and each track of the CD will be added to the Library on your computer.

4) Once all tracks (usually between 8 and 100) are added to your library, connect your device via USB. Once you do this, the right hand side of the media player will indicate that your device is connected.

5) Click on the Music tab on the upper left and navigate to the CD you just downloaded. Just type in the title of the book in the search area and it will take you right to it.

6) Highlight all of the tracks on that CD and drag them to the area on right (your device).

7) Click Start Sync.

That's it. Now do the same thing for each of the CDs. Obviously, it's better to store them on your SD card where you should have much more free space.

Now, you can listen to the book at any time without using bandwidth. Of course, this is just for your listening pleasure and should not be shared or in any way used to violate copyright laws.

There are many other options for listening to audio books on your phone such as audible.com (which is an Amazon.com company), but they all have a fee involved. One very cool feature of using Amazon.com is that you can access your purchased book as both an audio file and pick up reading it on your Kindle. Amazon.com also has a lot of audio book CD titles available for very reasonable prices. Other options include Audiobooks.com which will give you your first book free and then you pay monthly ($14.95 for one book per month, $22.95 for two). Definitely more expensive than my free library method, but admittedly much less of a hassle.